An “aging white population [is] speeding [up] diversity,” blared a headline on The Hill.

Once again, a Fake News outlet has confused cause and effect, giving readers the impression that the two trends—whites dying-out and minorities thriving—are spontaneous and strictly parallel.

The reverse is likely true. Corrected, The Hill headline should read:

Could speeding up diversity contribute to a decline in the white population?

We learn that “there are growing signs that the rate of change is increasing.” Well of course. America welcomes well over 1 million, mostly non-white, immigrants a year.

If white lives mattered at all to the liberal establishment, an inquiry would ensue: Is it possibility that an enormous influx of legal and illegal migrants over decades is playing a role in the decline of America’s founding population? (A similar, sad fate was visited on their predecessors, the Amerindians.)

On the one hand, we have the drastic decline of America’s white population; on the other, a massive inpouring of minority immigrants, since 1965. A correlation between the two makes sense. A large, well-controlled national survey, conducted by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, found that diversity immiserates and that the historic population is most affected. Perhaps protracted misery (associated with loss of community) hastens death.

The logic posits a zero-sum game. The native population has been swamped over time. Resources are scarce—especially when allocated by a wastrel, white-hating Administrative State. In hating on whites, civil society’s institutions are as culpable.

Is it not highly plausible, then, that immigration social engineering, compounded by state policies that privilege non-white newcomers, could contribute to a population decline in white America?

Picture the following scene, set somewhere in Trump country, say West Virginia:

A pale patriarch must help his bright son choose a career.

What about pursuing the law?

That’s inadvisable (unless you become an immigration attorney). Law schools routinely reject working-class white males, in favor of students who can show they’ve overcome the right kind of hardship. Berkeley and Texas, for instance, already make unusual hardships and life experience a crucial consideration in admissions. “Unusual hardship” is a racial cue card for things like having been shot, or quitting a gang. As commentator Steve Sailer once noted wryly, “The kind of hardships” that’ll be given extra credit are “largely peculiar to preferred minorities.” A Syrian refugee is bound to have a trump card in American universities, if Trump doesn’t deliver on his promise.